Author
Topic: Slow River Stones (Read 625 times)

I've been wanting river stones in TG for almost a decade, but alas, TG just doesn't handle lateral displacement without exponential slowdowns (I hope improvement is seen on things that have been begged for improvement for years over new features).

These are alright. They lack warping to elongate and vary the stone shape but they may look decent from a distance in small masked zones. Regular fake stones used as filler between river stones.

There are also two types of stone distributions to choose from, one based on Voronoi Billows, and one based on Voronoi A noise. Due to size variation between the two, the offset displacements in the Normal and Lateral may need adjustments.

If you can find ways to improve the speed, anyone, definitely go ahead and share it if you want to. Also the stone colour can be picked out and used for something at larger scales and will probably look a lot nicer. It was picked from a mountain project and just scaled down, but in general has a lot of detail to work with

The river stones can be rendered a tad faster by piping all the stone displacement through a Displacement to Vector, and than piping that vector through a Vector Displacement shader. The result renders a tad faster, but seems to have a tad less geometry detail or breaks in the geometry.